“Robert Rauschenberg and Photography” Exhibition

Pace MacGill

poster for “Robert Rauschenberg and Photography” Exhibition

This event has ended.

In the early 1950s at Black Mountain College, studying under Josef Albers and alongside Aaron Siskind, Rauschenberg began his career as a photographer and continued to use photography as a basis for art-making throughout his life. Albers’ Bauhaus influence can be seen in the way that Rauschenberg’s photographs explore surface qualities and attempt to get to the root of materials. His 1950 photograph of a naked light bulb, the cord that activates it, and the animated surface of a black tin ceiling creates a striking, non-hierarchical composition and offers a two-dimensional equivalent of the Elemental Sculptures he was making concurrently.

Robert Rauschenberg and Photography will include photographs and other bodies of work that incorporate photographic imagery, including Bleachers (bleached large format Polaroid prints mounted to aluminum), Nightshades (photographs silkscreened onto aluminum), and Photems (shaped collages of photographs). These process-oriented works embrace materiality, assemblage, erasure, and reflection– qualities that resurfaced time and again throughout his career. Yet at the center of his work is the photographic, reproducible image and its infinite possibility for permutation.

Walter Hopps, in discussing Rauschenberg, wrote that ‘to capture time is to fracture time.’ Rauschenberg’s mutating images, reversals, and variants arrest moments only to obscure them with splashy faux-expressionist brushwork which, in the case of the Nightshades and Bleachers, erodes the surfaces. ‘Painting’ becomes a tactic of erasure. Using his own photographs as well as appropriated material, he screened, transferred, and recycled images, using juxtaposition and obfuscation to create frames within frames, moving with energized fluidity between two and three-dimensional pieces, truly a post-modern artist in his laying bare of seams, interruptions and process.

[Image: Robert Rauschenberg “Ceiling + Light Bulb” (1950) digital ink print 17.75 x 78 in.]

Media

Schedule

from September 05, 2013 to November 02, 2013

Opening Reception on 2013-09-05 from 17:30 to 19:30

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